Make a wire bonsai tree - Part 2

You can paint the trunk and bark now. You can choose any color you want your tree to be but we chose a dark chocolate. If you have any gloss medium gel mix the paint with that. It will give the tree a certain amount of body and more texture.

Coat the whole tree, twigs and all. But, not too thick because we want the aluminum foil texture to show through. It gives the tree a bark-like texture.

Once it is dry if it is a bit too shiny you can paint over it with paint to give it more of a matte appearance. Once that is dry you can go over it very lightly with a lighter color and with a dry brushing techique that just leaves a little bit of light paint on it. (Dry brushing is where you put a lighter color on the brush then wipe most of it off the brush so the brush is rather dry. Then you lightly brush over the item you are painting. )

This picture gives you a really good look at how the dry brushing should end up.

Now Let's make the leaves. If you have green construction paper you can use that. If you do not have it you can paint green on a neutral color construction paper. You can even paint on the green paper if you want to change the tint of it.

Draw out a bunch of leaves on the paper once it has dried. And draw them all out by hand so no two are exactly the same. We want a little variation and this is easily achieved by hand drawing them. Cut them out.

To attach the leaves to the tree you want to make some stems. Use some kind of a thin but firm material and form it into an "L" shape like this and glue it to the underside of the leaf. We used thin leather cord. Wire will also work. If your material is not brown you can paint it.

That cut leather stem is about one inch to one and a half inches in length.

No need to stem all the leaves right away. Do a few at first just to get a feel for them and how they look.

Only do about 3/4's of your leaves this way. These leaves attach to the sides of branches on the tree.

This leaf with step is hot glued to the side of a branch.

In effect it forms a little stem coming out of the side of the branch and the stem has a leaf on it. I will show you another picture to explain this.

But first we still have about a quarter of the leaves without stems on them. You apply a little hot glue to the underside of them and glue them to the very tips of the branches.

You can use some pliers to bend your branches around a bit to make it all fit in and look nice.

This picture shows the leaf arrangement. The black arrow points to how you attach a stemmed leaf to the side of a branch. And the orange arrow shows how you directly attach a plain leaf right to the top end of a branch.

Now you can paint the leaves a bit of a glossier color. Mix a gloss gel medium with green paint and water it down a bit . Paint the tops of your leaves and if theyi start to curl upward press on them lightly to encourage them to curl under. You may need to put on a few coats to get the right color. Also, once everything is dry you can go in with a tiny brush and brown paint and cover the little globs of hot glue so they look part of the tree branches.

I been putting this project off for a long time because I thought it would be challenging. Wow I was wrong. Paper making is so easy to do! And it comes out great. I love this and you are going to love it too! The possibilities are endless for scrolls, origami, fine writing and so much more. How to Make Paper

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